PUBLIC LIVES

PUBLIC LIVES; Treating Torture Victims, Body and Soul

By JAN HOFFMAN

Published: July 30, 2003

WE cut people like Dr. Allen Keller some slack: let them have their harmless, nutty obsessions. He needs to rush down to the Jersey Shore for a late-night invitational miniature-golf tournament? Is determined to plant Rugosa roses in the dunes? Fine. Whatever takes his mind off work.

Dr. Keller's work is the healing of torture victims. As director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, he has tended patients from 70 countries who have been gang raped, trampled, burned or forced by machete-wielding soldiers to choose between amputation at the wrist (''short sleeve?'') or elbow (''long sleeve?'').

Yet during an extended visit at Bellevue recently with Dr. Keller, who does plant flowers in the sand, and keeps a putter at his favorite miniature-golf course, only one story finally brings him to tears. Otherwise, he is a surprisingly cheerful fellow, enthusiastic to the brink of earnestness. He zooms through the teeming corridors of the country's oldest public hospital, leaning into life chin first, his body rushing to catch up, oblivious to his untied shoelace, a shirt untucked in the back.

''As a med student, I worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and came back here all charged up,'' says Dr. Keller, 44, waving to security guards. ''Bellevue is like a refugee camp with elevators.''

Last month, Dr. Keller, who also lectures about advocacy and medicine at his alma mater, the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, which co-sponsors the survivors' program, wrote a report with Physicians for Human Rights that struck home. Their interviews with asylum-seekers who are in American detention centers found mounting levels of post-traumatic stress. ''We have torture victims seeking safety here and the greeting they get is a windowless converted prison cell?'' says Dr. Keller, who conducts the air with flyaway hands.

A few patients wait outside his modest office. He grasps a palm, claps a shoulder. ''I am so proud that you came back today!'' he says to one. Another looks at him dully; on this steamy summer day, the patient wears a long-sleeved shirt to conceal his wrist stump. ''My guess is that he's from Sierra Leone, or another horror spot du jour,'' says Dr. Keller, who uses such phrases almost as emotional insulation.

''If I bled for all my patients I'd have no blood left,'' he said gently, closing his door. ''But if you become numb, you need to step back. So I focus on how to be there for the patient. I think, 'I get to sit in a room with people who are heroes' and I feel humbled by them. How do they keep going?''

Dr. Keller, whose staff treats survivors' physical, mental and social problems, says, ''I can't undo what has happened. But we can help them get on with their lives, to find a balance between horror and hope.''

As a respite, he has worked in Albania, Cambodia and Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's exile community in India, documenting abuses and training local medics. ''I got the opportunity to meet with His Holiness in the Buddhist equivalent of the Oval Office,'' recalls Dr. Keller. ''I was concerned because my Tibetan patients spoke of torture as their karma, as if they deserved it. And the Dalai Lama said, 'It doesn't mean that you or they should be passive about torture, but that maybe the karma is to speak out about it.' ''

RAISED in the suburbs of New Jersey, Dr. Keller was expected to establish a nice suburban practice. ''Dad was one of the kindest, most decent men I know,'' he says, unconsciously describing himself. ''He was a dentist. A lot of people don't think of loving your dentist, but his patients did. And he loved them back.''

As a soul-searching student in the refugee camp, Dr. Keller got the jolt that would animate his career: from malnutrition to missing limbs, he saw the deadly link between health care and human rights abuses. In 1995, he helped found the survivors' program, which has since cared for nearly 1,000 patients.

At night, he retreats to Montclair, N.J., to his wife, Suzy, a lawyer for battered women, and their two children. Sometimes, during small talk at parties, he mentions his job, hoping to raise money; after rougher days, though, he deflects with just ''I'm a doctor at Bellevue.''

''I live with the dichotomy,'' Dr. Keller says. ''One moment I'm seeing torture patients, the next I'm coaching KinderKickers. But my work puts everything in context'' -- shoulder shrug -- ''So we got a leak in the basement!''

Haltingly, he recounts grisly patient histories. ''How could people do such things?'' he asks about torturers. ''I'm scared that it's easier than we think.'' That is in part why he opposes torture to extract information from terrorists. ''We mustn't go there: it cheapens who we are.''

Then he brightens, remembering one victim, who came to the program not knowing whether her husband had survived. Within months, the husband found his way to the clinic. The couple's Bellevue reunion was ''delicious.''

But the husband died soon after of cancer, Dr. Keller at his bedside. Eventually, the widow was able to bring her children to America. They were due on Sept. 11. 2001.

On the Friday of that sleepless week from hell, during which Dr. Keller and his trauma-trained staff worked around the clock, the widow appeared.

''She wanted to introduce me to her children, who had just arrived,'' he says. ''They were all dressed in their Sunday best.'' Finally, at the memory of those beautiful roses blooming so improbably in the sand, Dr. Keller removes his glasses and weeps.